BOURGEOISIE

In 1800 the traditional division of society into "orders" or "estates" was rapidly giving way to concepts of class. The bourgeoisie straddled this change. The term bourgeoisie, no longer used to describe part of an order, became interchangeable with middle classes to embrace all economically secure groups between the nobility and urban and rural workers. Writers also divided the "bourgeoisie" or "middle classes" into upper, middle, and lower segments. The language of class described socioeconomic status, political convictions and hostilities, and educational and cultural attitudes, including the self-conscious awareness of belonging to a particular strata in society. The term soon became one of abuse in the nineteenth century, much used by socialist critics such as Karl Marx (1818–1883).

By the early nineteenth century the bourgeoisie was expanding both in scope and scale. It included professionals, notably lawyers, doctors, and engineers; civil servants; and landowners; as well as businessmen, bankers, and industrialists. The size and growth of the bourgeoisie, never recorded with any precision, depended on the extent of economic modernization, the development of the professions, and above all the bureaucratization of the state. By the end of the century the category had become much broader, embracing nearly all non-manual workers, including clerks in local government and in large manufacturing units.

In 1800, France—the richest, most industrialized, most centralized country—probably had the largest bourgeoisie in continental Europe. About one million of the twenty-nine million counted as well-off bourgeois, while another nine million who belonged to artisan and shopkeeper families, would be thought of as lower middle class. By 1900, 50 percent of the population of Paris would have considered itself bourgeois, if office workers are included with all the other groups.

Because Italy was slow to industrialize, the entrepreneurial bourgeoisie there remained tiny and was limited to northern cities such as Milan, where in 1838 the manufacturing and commercial elite of the city numbered in excess of 1,000, plus dominant professionals, including 500 engineers and 170 lawyers. Russia had a small and fragmented bourgeoisie, partly due to the survival of serfdom until 1861, the slowness of industrialization, and the dominance of foreign money in capitalist development. Around 1800 roughly 2 percent of Russians were judged to be middle class, by 1900, 10 percent.

The French Revolution of 1789 helped define the bourgeoisie as a social and political class, particularly the abolition of the privileges of clergy and nobility (the First and Second Estates) on the night of 4 August 1789 and the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen later that month. The traditional professional, official, and landowning bourgeoisie gained most from the Revolution in land and politics and in the state bureaucracy. The Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars (1792–1814/15) ensured that similar social changes occurred in the huge amounts of Europe that France conquered. As in France, the bourgeoisie bought confiscated church land and acquired jobs in the state bureaucracy.

economic modernization

Economic modernization also increased both the size and political power of the bourgeoisie. In Russia the extravagant lifestyle of the nobility and their decreasing willingness to engage in trade and industry led to the rapid decline of some families. Long before the emancipation of the 1860s, ambitious serfs began to gain their freedom and establish themselves in the cotton industry, banking, and trade. Families such as the Morozovs, transformed from serf ribbon sellers into a commercial and industrial bourgeoisie, dominated the government of St. Petersburg and Moscow in the second half of the nineteenth century.

Elsewhere the high profile of cotton and railway kings encouraged the view that a capitalist bourgeoisie was taking power. In Britain, publicists like Samuel Smiles (1812–1904) eagerly created the idea that entrepreneurial growth liberated society from old bonds, offering new opportunities for the "self-made" man. In the mid-eighteenth century the brewer, Whitbread, bought big estates and a seat in Parliament. In 1830 and 1831 successively, two bankers, Jacques Laffitte and Casimir-Pierre Périer, were (briefly) chief ministers in France. Marx assumed that their elevation showed that the 1830 Revolution had replaced the nobility with a financial aristocracy, but entrepreneurs were never dominant in politics.

Economic "modernization" did not produce the social and political change some commentators feared and others welcomed. The revolutionaries in France in the 1790s raged first about "aristos," then about the bourgeoisie. Heads of families, many of them noble, who emigrated during the Revolution lost some land, but the proportion of noble-owned land fell by only 5 percent to 20 percent. The nobility was still the richest group in France well into the second half of the nineteenth century. The revolutionaries abolished nobility in the 1790s, but Napoleon created new titles, and in 1814 a hereditary Chamber of Peers shared legislative power with an elected Chamber. From 1831 no new hereditary titles were created in France, but families continued to luxuriate in the social snobbery of the plethora that survived, and to invent new ones. Both before and after 1789 French nobles and bourgeois shared political and economic power. In Prussia nobles retained control of the top jobs in the state and army throughout the century, alongside some newer bourgeois families whose fortunes had been made in banking, trade, and industry. In Russia tsars continued to appoint nobles as provincial governors, senior bureaucrats, and army officers. In addition, much of the investment for railway construction and rapid industrial growth in Russia at the end of the nineteenth century came from French, British, and German banks and did not stimulate the growth of the native middle class. Thus in 1914 the Russian middle class was tiny, fragmented, and in no position to claim a substantial role in government.

In Britain the power and wealth of the aristocracy actually increased in the nineteenth century. Land was the basis of their wealth, then there were the considerable rewards of patronage; government office; and industrial, business, and other financial investments. Although the middle class grew in size and influence, Britain was supremely dominated by aristocratic, rather than bourgeois entrepreneurial groups, to an extent unmatched elsewhere in Europe.

middle-class professionals

Elsewhere it was the landed and professional middle classes, already established in state service, whose numbers and influence increased most rapidly in the century. The real bourgeois revolution was not so much a consequence of industrialization, as of the increase in the power of the state and the consequent vast growth in the number of official appointments at all levels from menial to managerial. This growth was achieved at a cost. In the eighteenth century those who ran the judiciary in France, Prussia, and elsewhere had a degree of autonomy. Faced with defeat by successful French armies in the 1800s, European rulers accelerated their efforts to centralize and modernize the apparatus of the state, bringing previously semiautonomous professional bodies under their control.

Professionals responded by asserting that they were a service elite imbued with social duty and honor. The size and character of existing professions altered, and new jobs jostled for recognition as professions. The need for definition became acute as traditional fee-earning professionals were joined by salaried sectors, the first being the expanding army of bureaucrats. They led the way by defining a new professional ideal in which public esteem rather than independence was the prime feature.

The professions began to demand specific educational prerequisites for acolytes and standardized training under their corporate control. A profession became an increasingly closed corporation, limiting membership to protect "standards," but also to defend the income of existing members and to ensure that access to the professions was restricted to the wealthy. In France in the 1860s, 80 percent of law students were upper middle class. It was common for sons to follow fathers as lawyers or doctors.

Ironically, protecting their professions allowed states' power to increase. The newly required certificates of secondary education were taught and examined in state-run institutions. In Prussia, degree courses were officially validated, and no one could practice as a lawyer without a state appointment. In the early nineteenth century changes in the Prussian legal system made it the norm that after ten to twelve years of expensive legal training, a man had to spend nearly as long again working unpaid within the courts before he could hope to secure an official post. Even then his prospects for promotion were less than they had been a generation earlier. In France although lawyers could practice without an official post, they complained that the rationalization, standardization, and centralization involved in creating a single legal system for France in the 1790s reduced their autonomy.

Leading professionals remained critics of the state in the years up to 1848, and not entirely for selfish reasons. In Prussia and other German states members of the judiciary were prominent in demands for written constitutions on the model of the French constitution of 1814. Such individuals took the lead in the 1848 revolution. But partly because they were alarmed at the scale of popular unrest their protest engendered, lawyers

were subsequently mostly transformed into faithful and obedient servants of autocracy. Their reward was employment; job opportunities in the German bureaucracy increased and from the early 1880s the growth was astronomical as lawyers were allowed to practice privately.

Bourgeois doctors had key roles in movements for social reform and in the 1848 republic in France. Their politicization was ethical and altruistic. A generation of European doctors was appalled at the social effects of industrial and urban change. In England in 1830 Dr. James Phillips Kay (later Kay-Shuttleworth) drew attention to the plight of women and children cotton operatives. In France Drs. Louis-René Villermé and Eugène Buret wrote influential commentaries, the first detailing conditions among workers, especially women and children, in all of the textile industries, the second comparing their circumstances in England and France. Villermé, although sympathetic to capitalism, drew up the first French legislation restricting child labor. Republican socialist doctors like Ange Guépin in Nantes and Tissot Raspail in Paris set up free clinics to help the poor. However, doctors were drawn into an expanding state bureaucracy, vaccinating children against smallpox, taking part in state health insurance schemes, and so on.

education and the bourgeoisie

Education was crucial to the growth, definition, and development of middle-class groups. The huge expansion of education during the century was the product of middle-class initiative and was mainly for their benefit. Secondary and tertiary education were formalized by the introduction of state-administered secondary leaving certificates as well as certificates for specialized tertiary colleges. Revolutionary France led the way. Much criticized church-run secondary establishments were replaced by lycées providing a secular, state education. In 1808 the baccalaureate, or secondary leaving examination, was introduced. The failings of existing universities were compensated for by the creation of high-level colleges for aspiring state engineers, civil servants, and army officers. Other states imitated the French example.

Such secondary and tertiary education was strictly limited to the elite by cost and content: high fees and obligatory Latin. There were some scholarships to the Napoleonic lycées in France, but they were available mainly to sons of officials and army officers. Secondary school-leaving certificates, such as the new baccalaureate in France and the abitur in Germany, were rarely completed by pupils from poorer families. They became prerequisites for professional training and access to higher education.

Secondary education was enjoyed by a tiny bourgeois minority. In France roughly 60 percent of candidates, constituting 0.5 percent of the age cohort, successfully passed the baccalaureate. From 1812 secondary education in the German states consisted of annual examinations that had to be repeated if the student failed, culminating in the abitur. In 1820, one thousand boys passed the abitur. By 1830 this number had doubled, but was to fall subsequently due to a panic that there was a glut of qualified men, who were likely to be disaffected. Only in 1860 did the figure rise again to two thousand. In Germany in 1870 only 0.8 percent of nineteen-year-olds had the abitur; in 1911, 1.2 percent. As in France and elsewhere, many pupils left without the abitur, or attended other schools teaching the far less prestigious modern-scientific abitur.

The secondary syllabus, whether in a British public school, a French lycée, or a gymnasium in Germany, Italy, or Russia, was almost 50 percent Latin and Greek. In a Prussian gymnasium typically 46 percent of the time was spent on Latin and Greek, 17.5 percent on math, physics, and philosophy, and 4 percent was devoted to French. Until well into the second half of the nineteenth century only the classical secondary schools were allowed to prepare pupils for the leaving certificate. Middle-class families often preferred classical secondary education that would have no direct career significance, even when more modern scientific and technical alternatives emerged later in the century. There was a common assumption that unmitigated scientific learning bred socially discontented citizens, even revolutionaries. Classical learning conferred status. In some countries, Russia for instance, it gave automatic exemption from military service and a position in the Table of Ranks, the elite system developed by Peter the Great in the early eighteenth century that led, through state service, to noble rank. In 1879 German civil engineers objected when graduates of nonclassical secondary schools qualified for their branch of state service, not because the engineers needed Latin, but because they claimed the classics built character and added status. The upper layers of the middle class tried to use education to define themselves and create an impermeable barrier to social advance from below.

Education was a tool manipulated by the middle classes to control others. Primary schools trained the lower-middle class and urban and rural workers to accept their station in life. Pupils could not transfer from a primary to a secondary school. Primary schooling provided basic learning in the preferred national language and taught obedience to the state. Technical schools provided the chance to "advance" to foreman status; teacher-training colleges allowed sons and daughters of the lower classes to become primary-school teachers. Education was defined by gender as well as class. Until almost the end of the century girls were confined to primary education, often delivered by nuns.

bourgeois wives and families

The family was honored as the basic social unit. Monogamous, lifelong marriage was the norm. Families were essentially patriarchal. In France the authority of the father was enhanced by the Civil Code (1804). A wife lost control over the dowry she brought to a marriage; if she worked, her income was paid to her husband; she could not hold a bank account without her husband's consent; her husband could dictate where she lived. In 1816 the law permitting divorce, in place since 1792, was abolished and not restored until 1884.

A wife had less status than her children, and even by the end of the century reforms were modest. French inheritance laws were more favorable than elsewhere, sharing property among all surviving offspring, regardless of sex. In reality wealthy bourgeois families, like the aristocracy, practiced male primogeniture. Middle-class women only had a chance of independence if they were widowed. However the wife was the queen bee, managing home and servants and developing social contacts, vital to reinforce the social standing and marriageability of the family. Women were often idealized as the spiritual and moral force within the family. The Roman Catholic cult of the Virgin Mary served to intensify this notion, vital because women were the main churchgoers. Women organized religious charities and creèches (day nurseries), giving them a busy public existence. In the artisan economy, when workshops adjoined the home, wives helped run the business. As larger units, department stores, and factories developed, pressures of scale introduced professional managers, excluding wives, and sometimes husbands, from the day-to-day running of the business.

Bourgeois sexual morality was gender and class specific. An active sex drive, exercised with servants or prostitutes long before marriage, was held to be an essential feature of masculinity. Unmarried bourgeois women were supposed to be uninterested in sex. The French Civil Code imposed penal sanctions on an adulterous wife, but tolerated her spouse's mistresses. The poor were reckoned to be without morality, although whether prostitutes were supposed to be driven solely by financial need, or were thought to have sexual appetites because they were nearer to the animal kingdom, was never clear.

bourgeois culture

Culture was another area where the middle classes imposed their values. Art galleries, museums, theaters, concert halls, and libraries were built by governments, local authorities, and sometimes by private associations of wealthy citizens. The first public art gallery was opened in Vienna in 1781, in Paris the Louvre opened in 1793. The National Gallery in London was launched in 1823, when the Austrians repaid their war loan. Soon municipal pride demanded that every substantial town have its own gallery/museum. Such "rational recreation" was the preserve of the bourgeoisie; the poor were excluded, either by price or by a variety of strategies. The British Museum, which opened in 1759, demanded a letter requesting admission.

Royal and noble private collectors of art were joined by the most wealthy bourgeois, who bought at annual salons, or by direct commission. Industrialists and businessmen in northern England amassed impressive collections of art. A prosperous dry-salter in Manchester, William Hardman, owned paintings by Titian, Canaletto, Veronese, Ruisdael, Rembrandt, Wilson, Wright, and Fuseli. A family of Manchester cotton manufacturers, the Ashtons, owned a collection that included Constable, Turner, Collins, Holman Hunt, Egg, and Leighton. Thomas Holloway, a manufacturer of patent medicines not only collected Constable, Turner, Holman Hunt, and other fashionable artists but also endowed a women's college that became part of the University of London, as well as a sanatorium. Similar examples can be cited throughout Europe. In Moscow a small number of former serfs who had become millionaires amassed art collections. The present outstanding collection of impressionist art in the Tretyakov Gallery is the result of such enterprise. Savva Morozov helped to found the Moscow Art Theater.

The middle classes busied themselves running academies and literary societies such as the Literary and Philosophical Society (Manchester, 1781; Leeds, 1819). Mechanics' Institutes and Schools of Design were popular. They organized art exhibitions and concerts. In Manchester there were Gentlemen's Concerts, and Hermann Leo, a calico printer, intitiated Charles Hallé's long-lasting orchestral association with the city in 1848. In Leeds the musical association organized recitals in members' homes.

Middle-class observers poured scorn on the preferred leisure activities of workers—music halls, prizefights, and public hangings. Middle-class pressure groups made the second and third of these illegal in Britain in 1868, and music halls were subject to constant criticism because they combined food and entertainment with, worst of all, strong drink. In Britain bourgeois temperance and Sunday Observance societies bustled around to ensure that the working classes did not enjoy their very limited leisure. During the nineteenth century municipalities and private charities run by the middle classes began to try to "civilize" working people by creating public reading rooms and libraries and providing housing, hospitals, and clinics.

leisure

For those with money, leisure was a way of life. Until the improvement of roads and especially the construction of railways that made even distant places easily accessible, the European bourgeois family would spend the summer in spa towns such as Bath. Town centers were developed with luxury housing and public gardens where the wealthy could "promenade" safely for hours, discussing marriages (and more informal liaisons) and maybe business. Elegant and commodious assembly rooms were built with space to show off fashionable clothes, to see, and even more important, to be seen. Leisure activities, theater companies, exhibitions, and even waxworks adapted by touring to capture this temporarily static captive market. Madame Tussaud, who brought her collection of wax royals and revolutionary deaths' heads from Paris in 1802 spent the next thirty-three years touring Britain and Ireland with a fleet of touring caravans displaying the Tussaud's logo in gold letters. As soon as there was a dip in profits in Brighton she would move on with her growing collection of coronation displays and executed villains.

The railway revolutionized leisure and entertainment. It put Brighton a mere two hours from London. Although the cost was still substantial—in 1862 the price of a ticket was only one-third less than a coach ticket in 1820—far more people made the trip. On Easter Monday 1862, 132,000 people took the Brighton train. The "season" was dead. The middle classes went to Brighton for a day, indeed it became so crowded that the very rich abandoned the place. Theater companies and others began to travel far less. The railway meant that customers rather than the entertainment did the traveling. At first most of this traveling was limited to the comfortably off, although special excursion trains allowed workers to go on day trips to the sea. Third-class carriages were not introduced until the 1870s.

As travel became less a mark of prosperity, the rich began to tour farther. Queen Victoria set the trend when she decamped from the royal pavilion in Brighton, but she set her sights modestly on the Isle of Wight. Others mimicked the aristocratic "grand tour" of earlier times by venturing abroad. Normandy became popular with the British, but the Mediterranean was soon more chic. The tourist population of Nice rose from 575 in the winter of 1815 to 5,000 by 1861. There were fifty hotels in the city, twenty more than in 1847.

The concept that leisure should be built into the working life of the less wealthy middle classes developed. Annual seaside holidays within Britain became the norm. Thomas Cook led the way. The first Cook excursions were to the Great Exhibition of 1851. Also, government legislation gradually limited the working day. In Britain a ten-hour working day for women and children became the law in 1847, France followed for workers in mechanized factories in 1848, and for women in 1904. Some firms introduced half-day work for Saturdays. In 1870 a Bank Holiday Act was passed in Britain, and paid holidays were gradually introduced. Gradually, leisure ceased to be the preserve of the bourgeoisie.

bourgeois consumers

In recent years historians have suggested that the bourgeoisie were united less as a producing than as a consuming class. With increasing prosperity bourgeois women became the spearhead of a consumer society. The epicenter was the department store that provided for, or invented, all domestic needs. For the first time one store could provide clothes, shoes, hats, and underwear for the entire family, plus bedding, towels, furniture, jewelry, cosmetics, and even food. The first department stores opened in the 1860s. In Paris, the capital of culture at the time, the most famous, the Bon Marché was the first,

opened by Aristide Boucicaut and his wife in 1869. It served as Émile Zola's model for Au Bonheur des Dames (1883), in which he tried "to create the poetry of modern activity."

Department stores revolutionized mere shopping, creating a new culture of consumption. The main customers were bourgeois ladies, attracted by the safety, respectability, comfort, cleanliness, and elegance of the buildings, which were well lit and fitted. Stores stressed that ladies could visit their stores knowing that nothing would jar their feminine sensibility and moral uprightness. The department store was a freely available public space, but the female customers were reassured that it was a home-away-from-home that they could visit alone, unlike a theater or concert hall, where it was assumed ladies would have a male escort.

The stores did far more than satisfy the needs of their customers, they also taught them what they ought to buy. In the later years of the century the catalogs of these "palaces of purchasing" shaped the standards of the middle-class home. They taught those who aspired to be more middle class the ground rules of the game. The stores and their catalogs cultivated a fantasy of culture, decorating the departments to turn them into an enchanting fairy-land of design, color, and light. The shopper was invited to move from her own mundane domestic existence to a dream world of exciting drapery, mirrors, entrancing perfumes, and endlessly courteous staff. Department stores presented themselves as the peak of modernity. Technical advances facilitated this process, whether it was plate-glass windows to replace earlier tiny panes of glass, or gas and later electric lighting. This was still luxury consumption for a small elite, but with the appealing illusion of democratic availability.

politics and the bourgeoisie

The middle classes organized themselves into, and excluded the poor from, a vast range of associations, from cultural and sporting to political. The most successful associations from which workers and also women were excluded were representative assemblies. The liberal bourgeoisie tried to manage their rulers and contain the potential subversive poor by asserting the principle of the sovereignty of the nation in elections. The French revolutionaries experimented unsuccessfully with representative institutions in the 1790s but soon acquired a dictatorial emperor instead. After the Napoleonic Wars, British radicals demanded reform of the House of Commons, and the French argued over voting rights within a constitution modeled to some degree on that of Britain. Campaigns for suffrage reform were mainly the initiative of middle-class reformers. In Britain the Chartist movement of the 1830s and 1840s, backed by some members of the lower-middle classes, artisans, and better-off factory workers, pressed for a democratic electorate as did societies like the mainly middle-class Friends of the People in France. The French enfranchised all adult males after the 1848 revolution, and in 1867 all male householders got the vote in Britain. Elected assemblies at all levels, municipal to national, gradually became the norm in all countries. Until 1919 none rivaled the French by enfranchising all adult males. Few worried that the 50 percent of adults who happened to be female had no vote.

The extension of the right to vote tended to perpetuate traditional elites. In Britain the Reform Act of 1832 had no impact on the composition of Parliament. In 1840, 80 percent of members still represented the landed interest and the proportion of bourgeois entrepreneurs—97 members out of 658, or about 14 percent—was the same as at the end of the eighteenth century. Perhaps this was unsurprising, given the limited nature of the legislation. However, the same was true in France, even after the introduction of universal male suffrage in 1848. In 1861 the new united Italy adopted a 40-lira tax qualification for voters, which produced an electorate comparable to that of France before 1848. The Italian ruling elite was not only wealthy, it was also almost exclusively northern. Universal male suffrage had to wait until 1919. Frederick William IV of Prussia (r. 1840–1861) established in 1849 a graded suffrage for the elected Landtag, which allowed the richest 18 percent of taxpayers to elect two-thirds of the new legislative assembly he created. This system was retained for the assemblies of some of the individual states after unification. The Reichstag, the representative assembly for the whole German Empire created in 1871, was elected by all adult males, but it exercised little power. When elected local councils, zemstvos, were set up in Russia in the 1860s and an imperial parliament or Duma after the 1905 revolution, an even narrower hierarchical voting system was inaugurated. Elected assemblies only began to make a role for themselves in Russia during World War I. Unsurprisingly, in an age of unpaid MPs, assemblies tended to be staffed by, as well as represent the interests of, wealthy bourgeois elites. However, by 1914 the socialists were the largest single group in both the German Reichstag and the French assembly, and a growing, though a very divided, number in Italy. In the German Reichstag a majority of both socialist voters and a substantial number of assembly members were workers, a situation aided by a modest salary from the Social Democratic Party (SPD), thirty years before Reichstag members were paid by the state. However in excess of half of the SPD members in the Reichstag (122 out of 215) were journalists. In France and Italy the proportion of lower-middle-class voters was much higher, and the assembly members were predominantly middle class, with leaders often from the legal profession.

Throughout the century middle-class groups were concerned that radicals and socialists would exploit the very evident social and economic inequalities that increased as a result of modern industrialization. Marx preached inevitable bourgeois, then proletarian revolution as the ultimate consequence of capitalist development. However although the century was punctuated with revolutions in 1830, 1848, and in 1871 in Paris, tensions were defused by social insurance schemes, private and state-run, by the legalization of trade unions, and by the provision of state-organized education. The development of parliamentary institutions created the illusion of consultation and democratic control, and the promotion of nationalist and imperialistic sentiments stimulated the illusion of all social groups sharing common goals. The Socialist International's demand for international proletarian solidarity in 1914 went unheard.

The gap between rich and poor widened. This was most visible at the top. In Britain in 1803 the top 2 percent owned 20 percent of the wealth of the country; by 1867 they owned 40 percent. Wealth had always corresponded closely to power. The elites of the nineteenth century institutionalized the equation by demanding tax qualifications for voters, while pretending to eliminate privilege. Hierarchically structured education systems, professions, and assemblies of all sorts plus improved policing, military control, and the monitoring and managing of public opinion allowed a narrow section of society to dominate. One should take care, however, not to assume that this was a "bourgeois" century. In most states aristocratic families maintained their economic, social, and political control.

To what extent did shared attitudes to education and social values give the bourgeoisie common political ideas? Liberalism is often spoken of as the creed of the middle classes. In reality, although many members of the middle classes may have favored somewhat elitist, rather than democratic, political systems, the middle classes ranged among all political formations and attitudes, from right wing to socialists, from nationalist to internationalist, and from laissez-faire to more protectionist economic ideas.

This dissection of "the bourgeoisie" has revealed the diversity and huge range of occupations, income, and attitudes within the bourgeoisie. Middle-class groups came nearest to unity in ideas on education, on the family, on the role of women, and on culture. They were farthest apart on politics. If bourgeois liberalism had been a reality instead of a myth and a convenient shorthand, the liberals in the Prussian Landtag would have united to secure liberal constitutional as well as economic objectives in return for their concurrence with the chancellor Otto von Bismarck's cynical manipulation of nationalist sentiments; the constitutional monarchy would have triumphed over fascism in Italy; and the Russian Revolution would have been avoided. Class did not correspond to political interest and identity.

See alsoAristocracy; Capitalism; Cities and Towns; Class and Social Relations; Education; Housing; Marriage and Family; Peasants; Professions; Working Class.

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Pamela Pilbeam